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March 07, 2007

A nice pile o’ Lightroom raves

Scott Kelby has done a great job collecting tons of raves (and a few dings) about Lightroom: check ’em out. Elsewhere, Scott posted a lovely panorama of El Capitan, shot in recent days and stitched together in Photoshop CS3 (see notes). But c’mon, Scott–no Zoomify? Let’s see that detail. ;-)

Comments

Rich MacDonald — 8:38 PM on March 07, 2007

Scott Kelby’s write-up is a perfect example of the need to override smart/automatic features for this type of image-mosaic. Scanning film for panorama work is nice in that it usually means slightly higher resolution and noticeably better exposure latitude – the latter is especially nice with the wider the angle of view that is taken. But unfortunately some scanning software tries to auto expose and color balance each frame individually which can screw you up even if you do control aperture, shutter speed, rotation, focus, etc.
I’ve been thinking about this oft-repeating problem of “smart features” getting in the way. It’s my biggest gripe with PhotoMerge: it’s too automatic and “smart” for it’s own good. There should be more user intervention possible, at the very least in the forms of:
Being able to lock a layer so that other layers are adjusted to it while it doesn’t change.
Awareness of layer masks so that you can tell Photoshop the parts of the image you want to prioritize more to be aligned

PhotoMerge seems to work well a fair amount of the time. But without the above options, when it doesn’t work the way you want, you don’t really have a way to refine it – at least that I’ve been able to figure out.
Computer vision has it’s strengths, but there are many things the human brain excels at. Ideally Photoshop would facilitate a more powerful collaboration between the two….

Rich, yes you can. Check the keep layers box in the photomerge window. When it comes up use the difference option for the individual layers and you can adjust each photo separately for your own preference. Lock the pixels in each layer as you get them where you want it and go… It is the best thing I have seen anywhere.